Un-Social Networking

Last year, Virgin Atlantic found employees slagging off customers on Facebook. Last week it was Tesco’s turn. Now, Waitrose has found their staff making nasty noises in the online world.

The insults aren’t particularly great – with comments calling customers pikeys, ugly, mad and smelly – which could be extremely damaging to the brand and its connotations.

Waitrose response was that it is “completely unacceptable behaviour. It goes against our codes of conduct which make it very clear that partners who post this type of material are in breach of their terms of employment….The nature of the internet makes it difficult to get content removed once posted, however we do have teams that monitor website activity and will be conducting an immediate investigation.”

Personally, I think responding favorably offline in this way is a great way of ensuring something online can be brought under control. Social media is notoriously difficult to reign in if negative views are floating around – and by reassuring customers that they’re taking the matter seriously, as well as giving off signs to staff that it won’t be tolerated, Waitrose seem to be dealing with this quite well.

Social Integration

Love Twitter AND Google?

Well, now your Christmas has come early, as the micro-blogging site is about to be integrated with Google Friend Connect.

Basically, this means that when you join a friend-connected site, you can choose to use your Twitter profile and discover who you might know has also joined. You can also Tweet to the world about what’s going on.

Friend Connect lets webmasters add Google social features like chat to their Web sites with just a few clicks. Announced in May, it was launched this month, but isn’t a particularly new idea, as Facebook and MySpace have been running this for a while. (Facebook Connect and MySpaceID).

Interestingly, MySpaceID went live in the early half of the same month that Google annouced it’s Friend Connect concept. And Twitter was a partner with MSID. Even more confusing, Google partnered with MySpace to challenge Facebook.

Confused yet? This is like some social version of the whole Google-Yahoo-Microsoft saga earlier this year…

Social Virus

Facebook’s 120m users are being attacked by a virus…

Designed to steal credit card information and ID’s, ‘Koobface’ spreads by sending a message to people’s inboxes, pretending to be from a friend.

If you get a message saying something along the lines of “you look funny in this new video” or “you look just awesome in this new video”, don’t open it…

We all knew it would only be a matter of time before hackers began using social networking sites to try to cash in – although we saw this very same virus on MySpace back in August.

Facebook won’t give any specifics on how many users have been hit by the virus, only saying it’s a small percentage, but with that many users, it’s likely to be a considerable amount of people who have been unfortunate enough to be hit.

Last Social Stance

Lastminute.com’s marketing guys continue to push the boundaries, this time setting up the company on Twitter.

I see this as being a bold move, and certainly could be setting the standards for other large companies. Increasingly, research is showing us that in order to actively engage online consumers, companies need to be embracing social media. This doesn’t necessarily have to take the form of a Facebook page or a dedicated network site, but can take more simple forms, such as on-site customer reviews or a well-managed blog – the latter of which, incidentally, Lastminute have been running successfully for some time now.

Twitter is already seeing interest and activity from some companies, but for a major player like Lastminute to start tweeting could well mean that we’ll be seeing some of the more well-known businesses suddenly online this way, especially when they see how quickly Lastminute’s been gaining followers.

Twitter = Terrorism

In case anyone missed it, the US intelligence agencies – CIA, FBI, IBM – announced that Twitter means terror.

A rough report that somehow (as usual) found its way onto the internet gives a fun list of online and mobile apps – including MySpace, Facebook and Twitter – that apparently terrorists could be using. (As an aside, if I worked for a security agency, I’d be more worried about how a report like that got out onto the internet).

I won’t deny that social media has been – and still is – used by people to post extremist ideology, racism and the like, but when this happened, it’s totally unacceptable and is more often than not removed very quickly, with often nasty reprocussions for whoever posted it.

I think though, what they’re panicking about is that certain media is practically in realtime, therefore seemingly a great tool for the tech-savvy terrorist. Which, to be honest, is possibly pushing any boundary of common sense; I personally doubt such people would be operating openly on social platforms - and what about all the other technological advances since the carrier pidgeon? Email, SMS - even a phone call - seem more likely to be used by the social-conscious terrorist.

I suppose, for arguments sake, that social platforms could be used for grooming and recruiting into that kind of thing, but I’m fairly sure we’d all notice if al-Qaeda was on Bebo.

Now our wonderful Government seems to be calling for the likes of GCHQ and Mi5 to be able to monitor mobile and internet-based systems, storing details of ALL phone calls made and websites visited for up to two years in some kind of storage-super-computer. The wonderful Jacqui Smith seems to suggested this, but even top anti-terror experts are saying it’s nuts.

At least makes Google’s ideas on data storage look like a nice option, for once.

Anti-Social Networking

Found this at Clever Little Pod. It amused me – is this the the future of online networking?!

 

Apocalyptical Confusion

Ok, there seems to have been some confusion over my opinion that the digital industry will flourish as the economy takes a down-turn.

My original comments related to online marketing.

Alongside my otimistic agency views, I’m also of the opinion that other internet-functioning businesses could be hit pretty hard. Examples:

E-Bay issued a stark warning that profits could be down this christmas – this last quarter saw revenue rise by 12% ($2.12bn) which was lower than analyst predictions. A quick recalculation later and the number-monkeys expect total 2008 revenue to be between $8.53 - $8.68bn (still more money than most people will ever see). 

To be more competitive, Amazon has slashed it’s free delivery qualification costs from £15 to £5. This means that over 90% of their products will be delivered for free. I personally think this is just common sense – leading industry experts have long-advised companies to play around more with free delivery.

Google’s market-share has dipped a teeny-tiny bit. My cynical side says that this explains why they’ve suddenly backtracked on their long-standing policy not to allow gambling advertisements. Now, potentially generating £millions more with this hypocritical move, as we have already seen a quarterly increase on profit this year. I’m sure we’ll see Google beginning to strangle the competition again.

Social networks are struggling to generate viable income. Which is no big secret. Sadly though, this is directly affecting people working in the industry, as they become statistics in the economic downturn. The most recent victim is Hi5, the third largest global network, where it was announced this week that around 10-15% of the workforce would be laid off. Other companies being affected include start-ups and software; again, the most recent casualty being Jive.

When the whole world is suffering economic crisis, it’s obviously going to affect the world-wide-web. But to reiterate my original point; some parts of the digital industry will do well from the misfortune of others. Yes, it will get increasingly competitive, but with decent strategy and user-confidence, those who succeed will be very apparent. Whilst we’re seeing companies collapse every day, I hardly think this is the end of the internet.

Social Tuesdays

Brilliant.

This week, another research report was released which analysed the average user’s time spent on social networking sites. Whilst it strikes me that NewBay Software need to show an understanding of their products in the market, it nevertheless seems a slight waste of time and resources to conclude overall that Tuesday is the most popular day for updating profiles and status, “usually” between 10pm and 11pm. How could this possibly be any use to anyone? For argument’s sake, if you were to go down the path of targeted advertising, then, great – you have a time-frame to work with, but no real demographic. I’m still slightly confused as to which country this research was carried out in, let alone an understanding of the important data that could be drawn from this. (Read: Male/Female activity, Ages Groups, Location etc).

More usefully though, the report indicated that the average social networker spends an around fourteen minutes on their Myspace/Facebook/Bebo/etc. accounts whilst on the move, which is actually quite a decent insight into the rapidly growing relationship between mobile technology, the internet and users. I’m fairly sure that other information could have just as easily revealed this, but perhaps Newbay wanted a decent piece of PR; the kind of titbit-info you mention whilst in the pub. My cynisism slightly takes over here, as their research neatly ties in the release of the world’s first ”Aggregated Mobile Social Networking Solution“. It sounds like an impressive product, (it probably is an impressive product), but the fact that it’s made by Newbay themselves hardly makes all this research impartial. They may know the market and want to prove themselves, but for all their efforts, perhaps we could have ended up with something a bit more informative.